A denial-of-service attack knocked out most public access to the federal court system for more than three hours. / Administrative Office of the United States Courts

by Michael Winter, USA TODAY

by Michael Winter, USA TODAY

A giant denial-of-service cyberattack paralyzed the federal court system for several hours Friday, following on the heels of a brief Gmail outage that rattled millions of users.

The attack, first reported by Politico, affected district, appeals and bankruptcy courts, blocked lawyers from filing documents and prevented public access to judiciary records through the PACER system.

A spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, whose site was also hit, confirmed to The Washington Times that the court system's sites went down at 3:22 p.m. Most access was restored by 7 p.m.

The Supreme Court was not affected, the paper added.

The court system is investigating the attack and who may be responsible.

There was no suggestion the court attack was related to the Gmail outage, The Florida Times-Unionsaid.

Friday night, Google explained that the outage was triggered by a software bug in an internal system. More than 42 million users of Gmail, Google Plus, Calendar and Documents were affected between 25 and 55 minutes.